open source hot reload/live update HTTP server

Question

I'm looking for a live reloading open source HTTP server. I have a bunch of HTML files (generated by pandoc) which I want to show in my browser and refresh/update the side whenever the HTML changes.

• serves HTML
• auto updates/live updates/hot reloads changes HTML files
• standalone tool (not a plugin for an IDE)
• minimal configuration
• simple binary download
• preferably not NPM based
• preferably some way to trigger a page reload other then changing a file, e.g. by sending a signal to the process

The closes I've found is live-server, but I would prefer a single binary to download and as far as I see cannot be triggered to update externally. I'm pretty sure I had exactly such a tool in the past, there were some capability of triggering a reload externally e.g. when a lazily loaded ressource changed or when not serving HTML files directly but via another web server.

Answer 1

The static site generator, Eleventy, uses Browsersync to live-reload pages, however this is an NPM module, which means it falls outside your preferences.

Another static site generator, Jekyll, has an option to enable Guard-LiveReload from the LiveReload Project. There are also browser extensions you can install to force page reloads.